Welcoming Refugees Is Austrian ‘Word Of The Year’… Border Fence Is ‘Misnomer Of The Year’

Getty3 Dec 2015

The Austrian University of Graz has announced their two words of the year — one positive and one negative — and they are both compositions minted especially for mass migration.

The Austrian word of the year 2015 is ‘Willkommenskultur’ — welcoming culture — a German compound word defined as meaning “attitudes and actions of those who want to help refugees fleeing war to lead a life of security and freedom”. Decided by a mass poll in which some 34,000 people took part and finalised by a panel of judges, the results of the 2015 year of the word award shows again the strong grip the political left has over language, and the primacy of the migration crisis in the popular conscience.

Further establishing this point is Intelligenzflüchtling, second place entrant for word of the year. Translating literally as intelligence refugee, the term is an insult directed at those who oppose unlimited mass migration, whose brains are said to have left to find refuge outside of their bodies, reportsKronen Zeitung.

The words selected are typical German Komposita — or ‘compound’ words — created by fusing together several stem words to create meaningful phrases that can be expressed with just one word for sake of ease. The nature of these words can make them extremely long and difficult for non-native speakers to pronounce — one popular example being Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsge, or rather ‘law delegating beef label monitoring’.

The committee has also awarded a misnomer of the year — Besondere bauliche Maßnahmen — which the chair has also called an antonym of the actual word of the year. Coined by the Austrian interior minister Johanna Mikl- Leiter and translating literally as special structural measure, the term is born of the desparate desire of the Austrian elite to call their border defences anything but a fence, which they consider to be provocative and hateful.

The word entered for second place for misnomer of the year could easily have been the word of the year in some circles. Coined by the anti-mass migration group the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamiation of the Continent (PEGIDA), Lügenpresse has become a rallying cry criticising the ‘lying press’, to which it translates.

PEGIDA has been the victim of a vicious smear campaign by the mainstream media over the past 13 months, as news reports miscast them as violent misanthropes who should be the first objects of suspicion in cases of violence towards ethnic minorities — even in cases where the violence transpires to be inter-ethnic and over botched drug deals.

This kind of behaviour has left many right-wing conservative Germans to give up on mainstream news altogether, hence the ‘liar press’ label. No doubt many in the PEGIDA movement would challenge the characterisation of their word as a ‘misnomer’.

The announcement of Austrian words of the year comes just a month after Britain’s Collins’ dictionary announced a similar list, with equally politically correct entries. Among the most prominent entries in the top ten were social-justice buzzwords shaming, manspreading, and transgenderism.

Watch: Germans give a master-class in Willkommenskultur, by cheering on migrants as they arrive in their new country